Mobile telephone devices have become ubiquitous in our society. Unlike conventional landline telephony services, which typically operate in a home or office and are delivered via a wire or cable and enjoy a highly consistent transmission quality, mobile telephone devices are subjected to use under varying radio environments which results in highly varying transmission quality and thus highly varying speech and data service performance to the end user. One challenge to those designing mobile telephone devices is to design the telephone devices to provide the desired speech and data quality even when the user is using the telephone device in challenging and changing radio environments. Further, wireless network operators also want users of their network to use telephone devices that provide adequate communication quality in all radio environments to ensure that the user has a satisfactory experience using the wireless network. Thus, there are numerous parties who desire to test the quality of communications provided by a mobile telephone device.
There are, however, a wide variety of telephone devices used for communicating over wireless mobile telephone networks. With the proliferation of mobile telephone devices, many designs of telephones have evolved. The different designs of telephone devices result in different performance characteristics for each telephone device. Various design characteristics may impact the quality of the speech and data services provided by a telephone device and its ability to provide communications in varying radio environments. For example, the radio front-end of a telephone device, which drives, in part, the radiated performance (a devices ability to receive and transmit radio signals) of the device may positively or negatively impact the quality of communications in various radio environments. Another factor may be the device's capability to cancel interfering radio signals from wanted radio signals in order to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and thereby improve the quality of communications. Other design factors include (a) the performance of the device's digital signal processor, (b) the design of the device's operating system and associated applications including the handling of TCP/IP communication. As a result, the many different mobile telephone devices have varying performance characteristics due to their design. Thus, different telephone devices operating in the same radio environment provide different qualities of communication.
As the mobile telephone networks have developed, various digital communication services have been introduced, including data communications and digital voice communications. Along with the conventional voice services provided in the past, mobile telephone devices are being used to access the internet, communicate text messages, video files, audio files, email and other data. Moreover, users often use mobile devices to access multiple services currently such as email, voice communications, web surfing, downloading file, watching video, SMS, etc. A challenge to mobile telephone device manufacturers, and to wireless carriers, is how to evaluate the relative performance of mobile telephone devices for the various voice and data services—especially when multiple services are used concurrently.
Another challenge is to objectively compare the communication quality of different mobile telephone devices in a consistent manner. Some embodiments of the present invention provide methods and systems to objectively test the qualities of service of different mobile telephone devices in varying environments when multiple communication services are provided concurrently. These and other advantageous may be provided by one or more embodiments of the present invention.
The invention will be better understood by reference to the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.